Top Jupiter Facts

This video talks about the biggest planet in our solar system, Jupiter.

I'm Robert Massey and I'm here from the Royal Astronomical Society which is one of the biggest astronomical organizations in the world and we look after the interests of astronomers not just in the UK but across the world. What I'm going to do today is give you a few pointers to get you started in astronomy which I think is one of the most incredibly interesting subjects there is. Jupiter is by far the biggest in the solar system.

It's so big that you could fit 1,300 Earths inside it. It's a vast object. Now, it's also quite a long way from the sun so the top of its atmosphere is rather cold.

But it acts almost like a solar system in miniature, it's got something like a hundred moons in orbit around it, some of which might actually be possible places that life could exist. One of then, Europa, has a deep ocean of liquid water and it's an intriguing world and we've already sent probes there, we want to know a bit more about it. But the planet itself has a vile weather system.

It's big but it rotates every ten hours and what that means is that it literally bulges out of the equator and if you have even a small telescope, you can see that for yourself, and that rotation then also generates some vile weather to so vile that one of the storms on Jupiter, the Great Red Spot, has been raging for something like 350 years and on this planet, everything is big. You can drop several Earths into the Great Red Spot and still have space left over. .